Best practice collection?!

[shifty]

I am about to introduce JAMF to my company. I have read through the admin manual and I have an idea of what is possible and where I can set the main features.

Which brings me to the next step and my question: Is there a best practice collection on how to introduce JAMF into a company? How to plan the introduction, how to deploy and set up the computers. From your experience, is it better to install the packages or let the users do it via Self Service.. I know that there is a search, but this comes up with a lot of threads. I would like to have a best of… :)

I also know, that this is pretty individual to every company but I would love to have some guidelines which I could use as guiding and which I than can adopt into our scenario.

[a_bautista]

It depends on your user base I would say. We install a lot of software as a policy and it's not optional, such as ms office, every staff member requires this and it also requires some post flight policies, such as license activation and disabling first run dialogues. Our tech dept runs these as a user may find it confusing to activate their own software.

Some software which not all of our users use are available in self service. For example, our teachers use smartboards, but not every class or teacher uses a smart board so the software for them, Smart Notebook is available in self service where the teachers are free to install it if they use it.

Generally, if it's in ITs realm to install software or policies, we install them. We leave the easy optional software to the users and let them install it on their own.

[Look]

The two things I found as a really good starting point are.
1: Extension attributes and general inventory stuff, it's quite surprising the stuff you find out about your fleet once you start collecting info on it!
2: Self Service, this takes a little bit of work to get going but it's a very good way of making JAMF and it's benefits visible to the wider organisation, the first place I started was by talking to the desktop support team and trying to automate soem of their most common manual fixes, initially for them and then later on for users to do themselves.